Saturday, July 9, 2016

In a world that’s quickly heating up and drying up, you can’t go home
again—even if you never leave—Clive Thompson

Barbara
Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behavior
was, according to The Globe and Mail, the first novel that dealt “specifically,
determinedly and overtly with climate change. [And] only Kingsolver could pull
it off.”

The premise
of climate change and its effect on the monarch butterfly migration is told
through the eyes of Dellarobia Turnbow, a rural housewife, who yearns for
meaning in her life.

The book
starts with her scrambling up the forested mountain—slated to be clear cut—behind
her eastern Tennessee farmhouse; she is desperate to take flight from her dull
and pointless marriage of myopic routine. The first line of Kingsolver’s book
reads: “A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life
away, and it is one part rapture.” Dellarobia thinks she’s about to throw away
her ordinary life by running away with the telephone man. But the rapture she’s
about to experience is not from the thrill of truancy; it will come from the
intervention of Nature:

A small shift between cloud and sun altered the daylight,
and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The forest
blazed with its own internal flame. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for help,
she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing
else present made sense…The mountain seemed to explode with light. Brightness
of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave. Like the disturbed
surface of a lake. Every bough glowed with an orange blaze. “Jesus God,” she
said again…Trees turned to fire…The flame now appeared to lift from individual
treetops in shows of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a
campfire when it’s poked. The sparks spiraled upwards in swirls like funnel
clouds….It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than
either of those elements alone. The impossible…She was on her own here, staring
at glowing trees. Fascination curled itself around her fright. This was no
forest fire. She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better
and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn’t
remember when she’d had such room for being. This was not just another fake
thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking
around in someone’s thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had
appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these
orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became brightness rising. It looked
like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, and
ethereal wind. It had to mean something.

Although Dellarobia doesn’t realize it yet, that moment
proves life-changing for her: no longer “watching a nearly touchable lover
behind her eyelids but now seeing flame in patterns that swirled and rippled. A
lake of fire.” That day, she participates in the sheep shearing, greatly
distracted from a new awakening to the power and wisdom of Nature:

“Watch and learn, Dellarobia thought, feeling an
unaccustomed sympathy for the animals, whose dumb helplessness generally
aggrieved her. Today they struck her as cannier than the people. If the forest
behind them burned, these sheep would come to terms with their fate in no time
flat. Flee or cower, they’d make their best call and fill up their bellies with
grass to hedge their bets. In every way more realistic about their
circumstances. And the border collies too. They would watch, ears up, forepaws
planted, patiently bearing with the mess made by undisciplined humans as the
world fell down around them.”

Climate change—and all that is associated with it—is
altering our planet irreparably, one sure-footed step at a time.

Entomologist Ovid Byron (in response to a reporter’s
suggestion that scientists disagree about whether it’s happening and whether
humans have a role) talks about the tipping point we’ve ignorantly raced past:
“The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the
canary in the mine. What they say now is, the
canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls… in a canoe. There is an
image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for
a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the
point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the
existence of the falls?” Ovid (Kinsolver) effectively reiterates what most
scientists know: that we have already crossed the tipping point of no return.
There is no point in looking back to restore what we are losing; there is only
the option of looking forward to adapt—and assist—as best we can.

The irony is that, as audible a roar climate change is for
scientists like Ovid, to most of us climate change whispers insidious notes too
subtle for us to comprehend or care about.

How does one grasp the gravity of a few degrees difference
in temperature? The subtle rise in sea level? The almost imperceptible shift in
the migratory pattern of a bird? When we are already so disconnected from
Nature and lack the sensibilities—and compassion—to recognize and empathize
with her trials and tribulations. Kingsolver suggests—quite accurately, I
think—that only scientists can truly appreciate the portent of these subtle
changes because it speaks in a language only they can understand.

Flight Behavior resonated with Kristen Poppleton, climate change educator, who shared that Kingsolver was spot on in
her “description of the grief and sensation of loss most of us in this business
of climate change education, communication and science carry around daily.” This
type of grief is so prevalent, in fact, that it has a name: solastalgia. Poppleton empathized with
scientist Ovid’s grief as Kingsolver writes, “The one thing most beloved to him
was dying. Not a death in the family…but maybe as serious as that.
He’d chased this life for all his years; it had brought him this distance…Now
began the steps of grief. It would pass through this world…while most
people paid no attention.”

Flight Behavior isn’t so much about climate change
and its effects and its continued denial as it is about our perceptions and the
actions that rise from them: the motives that drive denial and belief. This is
no more apparent than in Kingsolver’s use of biblical references of fire and
flood. Both water and flame are potent cleansing agents. They evoke powerful
change. They represent givers—and takers—of life. Together, fire and water frame Kingsolver's book with a strong metaphoric beginning and end that embraces creative destruction.

Kathleen Byrne of The Globe and Mail writes: “We begin in flames and
end in flood, which suits the biblical (and scientific) parameters of a novel
whose setting in Tennessee’s Appalachian mountains is the nexus of a
God-fearing religious literalism and an untaught but unbudging righteousness
that finds expression in the view that “weather is the Lord’s business.”

To
Dellarobia’s question to Cub, her farmer husband, “Why would we believe Johnny
Midgeon about something scientific, and not the scientists?” he responds, “Johnny
Midgeon gives the weather report.” Kingsolver writes: “and Dellarobia saw her life pass before her
eyes, contained in the small enclosure of this logic. All knowledge measured,
first and last, by one’s allegiance to the teacher.”

Ovid shares a terrible insight about science and our
perceptions of scientists with Dellarobia: “There are always more questions.
Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish
line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists
with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see
the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common
misunderstanding, [Ovid] said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we
won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.”

The grief that Poppleton feels, voiced by Kingsolver
through her character Ovid, is really a grief for us, for the “home” we grew up
in and love. The world we made. Near
the end of Kingsolver’s book, Dellarobia makes this observation: “Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind
of all one…it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the
put-together of all your past choices.”

We—humanity—may not be around here for much longer. Nature
will endure without us. Planet Earth will continue, in some form and Nature and
life will endure, evolve, and flourish—in its own way. It will change, perhaps
grow more unruly than it is already, but Gaia will continue after she has
kicked us off. Ecologists have long recognized the pattern of colonization,
exploitation, decadence and succession. How hubristic of humanity not to
include itself in that cycle. The cycle of continuing change. We grasp—we
clamor—for the world we knew—even as we senselessly impose irreparable change. Shaving
forests to the ground so water has no where else to go but down and in a
torrent. Creating hot deserts by diverting great rivers somewhere else. Mining
vast oil and mineral reserves by scraping the earth until it “bleeds” from
unhealable wounds.

Evolution and Nature march on, greater than us,
encompassing us—whether we recognize it or not—in ways we can’t imagine (and
science is only beginning to discover).Our vast Universe is so much more than we are capable of even imagining.

Flight Behavior is a multi-layered metaphoric study of
“flight” in all its iterations: as movement, flow, change, transition, and
transcendence.

Kingsolver ends her book with Dellarobia caught in a
mountain flood that may take her life; yet, she remains suspended—transfixed in
the moment of the miracle unfolding before her. The monarchs survived the
winter and are taking flight:

“The vivid blur of their reflections glowed on the rumpled
surface of the water, not clearly defined as individual butterflies but as
masses of pooled, streaky color, like the sheen of floating oil, only brighter,
like a lava flow. That many.

She was wary of taking her eyes very far from her footing,
but now she did that, lifted her sights straight up to watch them passing
overhead. Not just a few, but throngs, an airborne zootic force flying out in
formation, as if to war…Her eyes held steady on the fire bursts of wings
reflected across the water, a merging of flame and flood. Above the lake of the
world, flanked by white mountains, they flew out to a new earth.”

Barbara Kingsolver

And a new earth is what we can be sure of. Whether we’ll
be there is debatable—unless we too change.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.

My guest today is Simon Rose,
an author of science fiction and fantasy novels for children and young adults,
with a recent novel, Future Imperfect that will thrill
your socks off. I met Simon some time ago through his awesome show, Fantasy Fiction, when we discussed
science fiction, ecology and why we write.

I recently had a chance to invite Simon aboard my intelligent ship, Vinny, orbiting the Earth. An SF veteran, he didn’t blink an eye when I
suggested the crystal-beam transporting device to get us aboard (it makes even
me a bit squeamish). After settling in the aft lounge with some pockta juice,
and a gorgeous view of Earth, we began the interview:

SFgirl: Tell us about your latest novel.

Simon: Future Imperfectis an exciting technology-driven
adventure featuring teenage geniuses, corporate espionage, and mysterious
messages. In the novel, we’re introduced to Andrew Mitchell,
who was one of the leading experts in highly advanced technology in Silicon
Valley, until he vanished following a car accident, which also injured his
son, Alex. When a mysterious app later appears on Alex’s phone, he and his
friend Stephanie embark on a terrifying journey involving secret technology,
corporate espionage, kidnapping, and murder in a desperate bid to save the
future from the sinister Veronica Castlewood.

The story will appeal
to all young readers for whom technology plays such a large role in their
lives, whether it’s cell phones, laptops, tablets, gaming, or the online world,
but it’s also a very compelling adventure story, with lots of cliffhangers,
twists, and turns.

SFgirl: I think it’ll be more than young readers enjoying it, Simon. Where can
people buy Future Imperfect?

Simon: My previous novel, Flashback, is a
paranormal adventure involving psychic phenomena, ghosts, imaginary friends,
mind control experiments, secrets, conspiracies, and time travel with a
difference. Flashback has two sequels coming out in 2017,
one in the spring and the third installment in the summer. These are already
completed but there will be revisions and editing along the way later this
year. I’m developing plans for some sequels to The Sphere of Septimusand Future imperfect may generate more adventures too. I’ve also
recently completed a parallel universe trilogy, which I’m currently exploring
publication options for.

SFgirl: What kind of marketing and promotion do you do?

Simon: I’m in all the usual places online and on social media but I’m also active
in the local writing community and conduct book signings at local bookstores on
a regular basis. In the spring I was at the Calgary
Comic and Entertainment Expo and also connected with readers at schools and libraries in
Montreal and Quebec City during Children's
Book Week. In August I’ll also be appearing at When Words Collide in Calgary.

SFgirl: I’ll see you then; I’m going too! So, what do you do besides write?

Simon: I work as an instructor for
adults at Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary. These classes
and courses focus on writing for children and young adults or preparing your
work for publication. I also offer coaching and editing services for writers in all genres and
conduct online writing courses, such as Writing for Children and
Young Adults and Writing Historical Fiction. I write screenplays, articles for
magazines, and offer copywriting services for websites, blogs, social media,
and businesses.

SFgirl: Simon, do you have any advice for new authors?

Simon Rose

Simon: Writing is in some ways the easy part. It can be a very long
process not only to write a book, but also to get it published. Most authors go
through many revisions before their work reaches its final format. Remember too
that your book will never be to everyone’s taste, so don’t be discouraged. A
firm belief in your own success is often what’s necessary. After all, if you
don’t believe in your book, how can you expect other people to?

Read as much as you can and write as often as you can. Keep an
ideas file, even if it’s only a name, title, sentence or an entire outline for
a novel. You never know when you might get another piece of the puzzle, perhaps
years later. You also mustn’t forget the marketing. You may produce the greatest
book ever written. However, no one else is going to see it if your book doesn’t
become known to potential readers. Be visible as an author. Do as many
readings, signings and personal appearances as you can. Get your name out there
and hopefully the rest will follow. Especially for newly published authors,
books don’t sell themselves and need a lot of help.

SFgirl: Excellent advice! Where can people learn more about you and your work?

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.

Monday, July 4, 2016

After learning of my science fiction background, one
of my writing coach clients very kindly gave me several 1950s issues of an SF
pulp magazine Other Worlds Science
Stories. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the last thing I needed
was more books—given that I’m more or less an itinerant and still trying to lighten
my material possessions.

But I was intrigued.

Tattered and smelling of “attic”, the magazines lured
with adventurous covers that summoned memories of why I started reading when I
was little: streamlined rocket ships, aliens from exotic planets, explorers on
adventures, and technological “utopias”.

1st issue of Astounding Stories 1930

Defined by SF author Robert Silverberg as the epitome
of the Science Fiction Golden Age, the 1940s heralded a panoply of short story
magazines of the fantastic culminating in a true Golden Age for science fiction
in the 1950s. According to Silverberg, the post-WWII 1950s saw “a spectacular
outpouring of stories and novels.” Howard Browne started Fantastic in 1952. Horace Gold started Galaxy Science Fiction in 1949. Anthony Boucher founded The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
in 1949. Samuel Mines ran Thrilling Wonder in the 1950s. And John W. Campbell
Jr. had started Astounding Science
Fiction in 1930, in which A.E. van Vogt and Robert A. Heinlein were first
published. Hugo Gernsback had started Amazing
Stories in 1926, in which Isaac Asimov was first published in 1939. Amazing Stories still runs today as an
online magazine.

Asimov's first story in 1939 issue

The Golden Age saw in some of the most enduring
science fiction tropes. Works celebrated scientific achievement and a sense of
wonder in our universe. Space opera (space adventure) and exploration of the
universe emerged; Isaac Asimov established the Three Laws of Robotics; Heinlein
expressed libertarian ideologies and we saw the re-emergence of spiritual
themes from the “pulp era”. Books that I read when I was young—Bradbury’s The Martian
Chronicles; Clarke’s Childhood’s End; Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids; and
Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz—came from this era.

Clark Publishing in Evanston, Illinois,
started to publish and sell Other Worlds
Science Stories for 35 cents in the late 1940s. Raymond A. Palmer and Bea
Mahaffey were editors.

I picked up the digest-size April 1953
issue of Other Worlds with its iconic
rocket ship in an alien world of lush alien vegetation and exploring astronauts
and large “moon” shining in the background; only in this case the lush world
was our moon and the “moon” in the sky was Earth. A changed Earth. The cover
art by Robert Gibson Jones portrayed a scene from the first story in the
magazine called “New Moon” by Raymond A. Palmer (the editor of the magazine)
and illustrated by H.W. McCauley. A story I found interesting for several
reasons.

Palmer introduces “New Moon” as a story taking place in 1967—14 years
after he wrote it and two years prior to the first moon landing by the Apollo
11 crew. He proposed a two-fold premise: 1) that we can measure and reasonably
predict dry and wet periods by using varves (layers in lake sediment); and 2)
that rocket scientists will send a rocket to the moon in reasonable time. In
fact, his story of a first moon landing was out by only two years.Palmer also set his story during a major
draught in America in the mid-sixties—a time when the Northeastern United
States would be hit with devastating drought that would last several years.

The horizon was near, a rolling pail of
brownish black, cutting down visibility to a matter of less than a quarter of a
mile In the yard a thorny rosebush whipped in the wind, a few dried leaves
still clinging to it. Above it the gaunt limbs of the great elm that had shaded
the house etched photographically potent arms against the tragic sky. The ditch
between the yard and the road was filled with curiously wind-rippled powdery
dust…

When the moon suddenly and literally turns green—blossoming
into a verdant paradise—scientists get excited. Enter Professor Pickersgill,
physicist and astronomer, who explains that this resulted from “a vast cloud of
atmospheric and water vapors that had drifted in from outer space, and had now
engulfed the moon. Or rather, the moon had gulped most of it in to itself.” Pickersgill
then explains to one of the crew who marveled at the speed of vegetative
growth, that the spores of life may exist in all space and if so, “they’ve been
falling for uncounted ages on the moon, accumulating in soil of incredible
fertility. Maybe all that was needed was the water and atmosphere. And among
all these strange vegetable forms, there must be hundreds unknown on Earth, and
many of them may be much swifter in growth than those adapted to Earth
conditions.”

Scientists now know that water exists
everywhere in the universe, from our own sun and planets to comets, dust clouds
and even whirlpool-like spinning black holes.

In June 2011, researchers at ESA’s
Herschel Space observatory identified a protostar or quasar, 750 light years
away. The young star was blasting jets of water into interstellar space from
its poles at 124,000 miles per hour. The telescope was able to trace where
hydrogen and oxygen, two of the most popular elements in the universe, formed
water on and around the star. Close to the star, its heat and pressure vaporize
the water into jets of gas. But farther away the water cools into droplets that
move like bullets at “80 times faster than the average round fired from a
rifle,”writes
Clay Dillow in Popular Science Magazine. The speedy spray is “equal to
the amount that flows through the Amazon every second,” researchers said. This
suggests two things: (1) that young protostars may be distributing vast
quantities of water, potentially seeding life elsewhere in the universe; and
(2) that water may have played a significant role in the formation of our own
sun and solar system. “Stars are the alchemists of the Universe,”Philip Ball
writes in H2O: A Biography of Water. Engines of creation,
“out of their hearts come the elements needed to make worlds.”—Nina Munteanu, Water Is…The Meaning of Water

Scientists have shown that water plays
a key role in the formation of organic molecules and together with the
vortex-like radiation of a neutron star may influence the creation of
life-forming amino acids. This is not surprising, considering water’s
ubiquitous nature and weird properties.

Because water is denser as a liquid than
as a solid, ice floats; this permits fish and other aquatic biota to live under
partially frozen rivers and lakes. Water—unlike most other liquids—also needs a
lot of heat to warm up even a little, which allows mammals to regulate their
body temperature. Life’s cellular processes rely on water’s ability to act as a
universal solvent. The high diffusion rate of water helps transport critical
substances in multicellular organ- isms and allows unicellular life to exist
without a circulatory system. one important result is that the viscosity of
blood, which behaves in a non-Newtonian way (its viscosity decreases with
pressure), will drop when the heart beats faster.—Nina Munteanu, Water Is…The Meaning of Water

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.

About Nina

I'm The Alien Next Door. I'm an ecologist and a published author of several novels, articles and reviews. I teach writing at George Brown College and UofT. I also coach writers. For more on writing (articles and advice) and more information about my coaching, visit me at Nina Munteanu Writing Coach. Visit Nina Munteanu Writer for more about my own writing. My new site The Meaning of Water is devoted to our precious water and brings my interest as an ecologist and limnologist to help understand the meaning and importance of this precious and mysterious element. Inside, you'll find articles that explore what water is and its meaning to this planet and to us as a species and life form.